How to find a great digital delivery manager
You may not always see or understand what the delivery manager does, but it should manifest in strong results
I’ve been a delivery manager/lead for 5+ years, helping various organisations successfully deliver their products and services. Having experienced both the benefits and challenges of delivery management, here are my top 3 tips for finding and recruiting a great delivery manager to enable you to roll out your products and services.
1. Understand the role better
When I mention being a delivery manager, people are often confused. Some assume I manage deliveries for online grocery shopping. Spoiler alert – I don’t. My daily work as a delivery manager changes a lot depending on the client, project and team. This is the nature of the role and it can make it challenging to tag a precise definition to it.
Contrary to the common belief, being a delivery manager isn’t the same as being a project manager. There are elements of project management in what delivery managers do, but their work goes beyond that. I often describe my role as a blend of a project manager, Agile coach, product manager, account manager and anything else I need to be!
Given that the role can vary, don’t get too hung up on perfectly defining what the delivery manager does. A high level overview can be more useful. So let’s define a delivery manager as: a professional who brings together and leverages a range of specialist and soft skills to lead, enable and empower multidisciplinary teams to successfully deliver what they are working on.
2. Know why you need one
A team member once told me: “We (the team) don’t know what it is that you do every day, but we really notice the difference when you are not around!”. You may not always see or understand what the delivery manager does, but it should manifest in strong results – a healthy and productive team, work delivered effectively and efficiently, and happy stakeholders.
I recently worked with a client who faced a variety of challenges on their programme, including significant delays due to unclear roles, responsibilities and leadership alongside inefficient ways of working. When we identified the root causes to these setbacks, it was quickly obvious that an experienced delivery manager would help the client tackle most challenges promptly, efficiently and cost effectively. For example, by embedding better processes and ways of working, guiding the team members in the right direction and continuously driving the work forward.
Here are some benefits and value that a delivery manager could bring you:
- ensuring the team delivers its goals, on time and within budget
- exceeding stakeholder, client and customer/user expectations
- helping the team focus on adding value early on and in the best way possible
- creating a safe and productive environment for the team to do their best work daily and sustainably
- establishing and continuously improving efficient and effective ways of working, saving time, money and energy
- preventing team members from burning out or leaving
- upskilling team members across different teams
- bridging the gap among experts across disciplines, stakeholders and organisations, often between technical and non-technical folks
To achieve these positive outcomes, you need to find a delivery manager with the right skills.
3. Be clear about the skills and instincts to look for
I’ve often seen organisations looking for skills and experiences that aren’t that important or relevant to being a great delivery manager. Instead, I recommend you look out for the following:
- patience and positive mindset
- ability to include and empathise with different people
- adaptability, flexibility and open mindedness to trying and learning new things
- commitment to continuous improvement in self and others
- leadership skills to know when to take charge and lead others, and when to step back and empower others to lead
- being organised and able to manage multiple priorities and stakeholder needs
- ability to clearly communicate with various audiences
- being proactive in helping the team tackle challenges and improve
- ability to apply different (ideally Agile) project and delivery management tools, processes and frameworks based on context
The skills and instincts above are much more important than whether the candidates have already used your exact methodologies and tools (they can learn that fairly quickly). You’ll expand your pool of candidates and find a great delivery manager by including people with various roles, job titles or experiences.
I hope that focusing on the above empowers you to find great delivery managers adding loads of value to your teams, projects and organisation. Please get in touch if you’d like to learn more about delivery management or get some coaching support.